Chapter Text
A lil AU today for all the kakasaku friends :) Set in Konoha, but with a non-canon timeline.
***
She had been young, the first time she'd seen him. An ANBU with silver hair, and a mask with a dog’s face.
She had been young. Too young, no more than five—and enemy shinobi had breached the outermost ring of Konoha. Sakura remembered it vividly, because she’d lost her parents that day. Both of them—first her father, and then her mother. She remembered the glassy look in their eyes, and the blood that poured from their throats.
Blood, Sakura had learned, was bright red. Burning red, scorching red. She’d never forget the sight of it, nor the smell. It had coated her hands, because she’d tried to pull her mother’s skin back together after the iwa-nin’s kunai had torn it apart.
It hadn’t worked. She hadn’t known how to heal then, like she did now.
She’d run after that. She still felt guilty for it sometimes. Bolting in terror, leaving her parents’ bodies behind. Villagers had screamed and run with her, and most of them had been hit by flying shuriken. She would’ve been hit—probably, she would’ve been killed—but then she’d been shoved to the ground—roughly, without precision.
Sakura had learned what blood had looked like that day. She had also learned what it felt like to have her face smashed into the dirt, and the sensation of mud smearing across her teeth. She would’ve screamed at it, but she didn’t remember screaming. She only remembered shaking, and the wetness of tears on her face.
“Don’t move.”
She remembered that, too. A soft voice, ordering her to keep still. And…a body above hers, keeping her pressed to the ground.
He was warm. He wasn’t touching her—he was hovering over her, covering her. But still, she remembered the warmth of him. And she remembered feeling fear when she’d turned her head to look at him, because a mask covered his face. A porcelain one, shaped like a hound.
His eyes were dark, and one of them was closed. She could see them through the holes in his mask.
“Don’t move,” he said again, in the same soft voice.
Her mother had always told her that the masked shinobi were dangerous. Sakura had seen them in the village, with their dark uniforms and their red tattoos.
Dangerous, her mother had said. They won’t hurt you — but they’re dangerous, Sakura.
She had wanted to run. But then, she hadn’t wanted to run, because it was quieter here with his body to muffle the sounds of the screams that surrounded them.
The Dog-man blinked at her, just once.
“You have pink hair,” he informed her mildly.
Sakura frowned at him. “Don’t make fun of my hair.”
His dark eye blinked again. “Maa, I wasn’t making fun of you. I was—”
He’d grunted, then. Sakura remembered that, because her mother had made the very same sound when the kunai had slashed her throat. The Dog-man had fared a little better—it had only been a shuriken to strike him, and it had caught him in the shoulder rather than his throat.
His blood was red. Some of it dripped onto her, because he hadn’t moved an inch. He still hovered over her—protecting her, Sakura had realized. The Dog-man was protecting her from the iwa-nin. He’d taken a shuriken for her.
Dangerous, her mother had said. How odd. He didn’t seem dangerous.
“Will they…will they stop?”
The Dog-man blinked at her again. “Yes.”
“Will we…be okay?”
He hesitated. “Yes.”
“Promise?”
He hesitated longer that time. “Of course,” he said, eventually.
Sakura had pressed her face back down into the dirt. The Dog-man held his position above her, even as she heard a thud and another soft grunt of pain leave his throat. Another shuriken must’ve hit him—and still, he didn’t move.
“Okay,” she whispered into the mud.
***
That had been the first time, and she never forgot it. Blood and mud and the Dog-man, whom her mother had said was dangerous. That had been a strange thing, Sakura had discovered as the days had passed since the ambush. Her mother had been wrong.
Not dangerous. The Dog-man had saved her, and so he couldn’t be dangerous. He’d sat with her for a while after the iwa-nin had been beaten, until she’d been taken to the hospital with the rest of the villagers.
She hadn’t seen him for a long time after that. She started in the ninja academy, and still she didn’t see him. She saw others like him—other shinobi in dark uniforms and porcelain animal masks, but none of them had been him.
Not until she was ten, and walking to the home she’d been placed in. Two parents, and two other siblings. They were…nice. They were nice. She was lucky to have been placed with them.
Mostly, she missed her mother. Sakura had been thinking about her as she walked home—her mother, and bright red blood. She’d gotten a little distracted, actually, and walked slower and slower until eventually she’d stopped, right in the middle of the dirt road that wound through Konoha.
In the distance, the sun was setting. How long had she stood there, while people passed her by without acknowledgement? Maybe hours.
It wasn’t until something dark flashed in the corner of her vision that she’d moved, and shaken her eyes away from the setting sun. And there he’d been, crouched in the darkness between two buildings on the side of the street—the Dog-man, in his mask and dark, dark uniform.
Dangerous. She remembered her mother’s voice saying it again and again. But, no— he wasn’t dangerous. He’d saved her. And he was… hurt, Sakura had slowly realized. He was crouched down because blood was streaming from his bicep, winding down his forearm to his fingers.
A kunai had probably caused it. Sakura knew that. She knew how it ripped through skin and made people bleed. She’d seen it once, years ago.
“You’re hurt,” she called to the man in the shadows across the street. “You’re bleeding.”
He’d looked up at her instantly. His open eye was narrowed, his muscles tensed. And then he’d relaxed, and gone back to examining his bloody arm.
“You have pink hair,” he called back to her.
Sakura huffed. “Don’t make fun of my hair.” The other kids in the academy did that. The boys that had lived across from her in her old neighborhood years ago had done it too. She hated it.
“Maa, I told you, I wasn’t making fun of your—”
“You’re bleeding,” Sakura interrupted him. He was closer now, because her feet had carried her across the street to where he stood.
He blinked at her. She remembered that. He had silver hair and he blinked a lot.
The Dog-man, Sakura thought, was a little weird.
“I am bleeding,” he agreed.
Sakura frowned at him. “Why are you bleeding?”
The Dog-man shrugged. “I got hurt.”
“Why don’t you go to the hospital?” Sakura knew where it was. She hadn’t been there since that day years ago—but she knew where it was. That was where they made people stop bleeding. That was where they sewed skin back together after a kunai had ripped it apart.
“I don’t like hospitals,” the Dog-man said.
Sakura tilted her head. “Why?”
He shrugged again. Definitely weird, Sakura decided. She slung the backpack she carried on her shoulders onto the ground, and wrenched open the zipper. Somewhere, somewhere in there were bandages, because she’d put them there. She’d stolen them out of the nice family’s bathroom drawer and shoved them in her bag…just in case.
Just in case the iwa-nin came back, and used a kunai on someone else. Bandages helped. They’d told her that in the first-aid class at school. Pressure, bandages, and a hospital. That was how you helped someone who was bleeding.
“Sit down,” Sakura told the Dog-man, as she yanked the bandages out of her bag.
His open eye crinkled in an amused sort of way. “Maa, I don’t need help—”
“Sit down,” Sakura said again, firmly. She put her hands on her hips, clutching the bandages in her fingers.
The Dog-man sat down. Sakura thought she heard him muttering to himself about a pink-haired brat.
His blood stained her fingertips. Sakura ignored it, and wrapped the bandages around his arm anyways. His skin was warm, but she knew that already. He’d been warm the first time she met him, on the day when everything had fallen apart.
“There,” she said, as she tucked the end of the bandages underneath itself to keep it secure. It was a messy job, but she couldn’t see the blood anymore.
Unless she looked at her hands, where it stained her fingertips. The Dog-man stood up again, and ruffled her hair with his good hand.
“Thanks,” he said, though he sounded more grumpy than appreciative.
Sakura sniffed at him. “You’re welcome,” she said, because her mother had always told her that having manners was important.
She looked down at her hands. They were still red. “Does it…ever come off?”
The Dog-man reached for her, and rubbed some of the blood away from her fingers with his thumb. He didn’t speak for a long while.
“Does it?” Sakura asked again, a little frantic.
He sighed. “Yeah,” he said slowly. “Sometimes.”
Sakura squeezed her hands into fists. He laid his hand over them, covering the blood. “Sometimes?”
She didn’t like answers like that. She liked yes and no , and nothing in-between.
“Sometimes,” he said again. He didn’t sound grumpy anymore. He sounded…tired, Sakura thought.
She tried again, determined to get an answer. “Will it go away if I wash it off?”
He blinked at her. His eyelashes were silver, she noticed. Just like his hair.
“Yes,” he said quietly.
“Promise?”
The Dog-man nodded slowly. “Promise.”
He walked beside her after that. All the way to the nice family’s house, deep in the center of the village. They’d snatched her inside when they’d seen who she was with, and closed the door firmly behind her.
Dangerous, they had said. But Sakura thought that didn’t make sense, because he wasn’t dangerous. He’d saved her, after all.
***
Sakura had a crush. A big, big crush. Actually, she was in love with him. Sooo in love with him.
He had dark hair, and even darker eyes. He was pretty. She looked at him too much, and worried that someone would catch her. She filled her notebook with doodles of his initials, and worried that someone would find them. She worried he’d get caught by enemy shinobi, and bleed bright red blood.
Uchiha Sasuke. Sasuke-kun. He was soooo handsome. Sakura was pretty sure she was going to marry him one day. She was also pretty sure they were going to have kids, and they’d look like him. Oooh, yes. She’d be Uchiha Sakura, and wear the sigil of his clan on her back.
She started to carry extra bandages in her bag, just in case Uchiha Sasuke got hurt. She’d be able to fix him. She knew it, because they’d taught her in the academy. She’d fixed the Dog-man that one night, two years ago. She knew that too, because she’d seen him since then, lurking in the shadows after the sun had set.
He was an ANBU agent. They’d taught her about them, once she’d become a genin. Black-ops, deadly, dangerous. Sometimes, Sakura wondered what he looked like. Surely he wore a disguise beneath the dog mask—according to Iruka-sensei, most of the ANBU did. The Dog-man’s silver hair and eyelashes were probably nothing more than a mirage, a henge to keep his identity hidden.
He could be anyone. Anyone in the village, anyone on the street. Maybe, Sakura thought suddenly, excitedly— maybe he was Sasuke-kun!! Sasuke would be the type to rescue a girl from a iwa-nin ambush. Yes, he’d rescue her and pull her out of harm’s way…and maybe kiss her…
Sakura frowned. There was a hole in her logic. The Dog-man couldn’t be Sasuke, because the Dog-man was weird. And he made fun of her hair. Sasuke wouldn’t do such a thing—Sasuke was, as Sakura had learned since she'd met him, perfect.
Sakura quickly resolved to ask the Dog-man who he was the next time she saw him. So she kept her eyes peeled every time she left the school and walked to the house deep in the center of Konoha, and to the family she still lived with.
They were a nice family. The mom was nice, and so was the dad. The siblings still teased her about her hair color. One of them knew about her crush on Sasuke, and they teased her about that too.
She still missed her mother. And her father. She still remembered how red their blood had been.
It took her weeks to see the Dog-man again. Until finally, she ran across him by chance on her way to school one morning. She’d left early, because the house where she lived had been loud and she’d wanted quiet. The road that wound through Konoha was quiet, if she walked upon it at the right time. And thankfully, the mornings were the right time. And the evenings.
So she’d left early, and there he was—standing in the shadows, with his porcelain mask pushed halfway up his face and a book in his hands. He was weird, because he wore another mask underneath the first—dark black cotton—and the book he held had a bright red warning on the back that said FOR ADULTS ONLY.
Sakura had seen books like that in the shops in town. She’d never been allowed to buy them; the mom within the family she lived with always looked at them in a disgusted sort of way, like they were gross.
Gross. She didn’t know what was in those books, but it must have been something weird. Sakura marched up to him anyways, and crossed her arms over her chest.
“Are you Sasuke?” she asked him, tapping her foot impatiently on the ground.
The Dog-man snorted without looking up from his book. It was strange to see more of his face. He had a jaw, and a chin. The black mask that covered it looked soft.
“Am I what?”
Sakura frowned. “Are you Sasuke? Uchiha?”
The Dog-man lowered his book. Sakura couldn’t quite see his eyes; they were hidden, mostly, by the way he’d pushed his ANBU mask up.
“No,” he said. He wasn’t laughing, but he sounded close to it. “Are you Sasuke?”
Sakura rolled her eyes. He was so weird. “No,” she said forcefully. “I’m Sakura.”
The Dog-man nodded, as if he already knew that. “I know,” he said. “They told me your name after—”
He didn’t finish. Sakura supposed he didn’t need to finish—she knew already what he meant. They— someone —must’ve told him her name years ago, after the iwa-nin ambush. Haruno Sakura, orphaned at five years old.
Sakura shook her head. She didn’t like thinking of that day, and so she pushed the memories away. “So…who are you then?”
The Dog-man chuckled. “I’m ANBU,” he said.
“What do they call you?” Sakura pressed, determined.
One of his hands left his book, and pulled his porcelain mask back down over his face. Behind it, she saw the grey of his eye—and that one of them, just like always, was closed. For the first time she noticed the faint scar that bisected his eyelid, and wondered what had caused it.
“Hound.”
Sakura wrinkled her nose. “Hound?”
The Dog-man— Hound —shrugged. “It’s my mask.”
“Hound,” Sakura said flatly. His eye crinkled in amusement.
“What do they call you, Pink-hair?”
“Don’t make fun of my—”
“Maa, I was only teasing,” Hound said, laughing softly. Sakura stamped her foot on the ground.
Hound was so weird.
“They call me Sakura,” Sakura said.
“Sakura,” Hound repeated.
“Sakura,” Sakura said again.
He walked her all the way to the school, and then jumped onto the roof and vanished after that.
Hound. Weird. And thankfully, not Sasuke-kun.
***
Sakura was fifteen before she managed to sneak one of those orange adult books out of the bookstore without anybody noticing. She hid it in her bag on the way to the house in the middle of the village, beneath the bandages she always carried.
She was just…curious. Hound carried these, every time she saw him guarding Konoha’s shadows. People talked about them, but never about what was actually in them.
Sakura thought it probably had something to do with sex. Which she didn’t care about, and wasn’t interested in. Other girls were, Ino certainly was, but Sakura wasn’t. She’d gotten a position at the hospital, and that was more important.
Not sex. She didn’t care about that. She was too young, anyways. And Sasuke-kun had left the village ages ago, and he was the only one she would’ve…
Well. It didn’t matter. She wasn’t interested. She’d had a crush once, and now she didn’t. She was training at the hospital now, learning to make the blood stop coming. Pressure, bandages—and now she knew how to stitch skin back together. Now she knew which veins bled the most, and where arteries were. She knew how to channel chakra to her hands, and how to heal.
She hadn’t known then, back on that day—but she knew now. She knew how to make the blood stop. She wished she knew how to make it less red.
The book was…interesting. Mostly, it was perverted. But there were some pages, some chapters, where she folded the pages down at the corners to mark them.
Sakura hadn’t known sex could feel good. She hadn’t been taught, it hadn’t been mentioned. She knew the mechanics of it—she knew bodies now, she knew about erections and wetness and…and ejaculations, but she hadn’t quite been told that it felt good. Kisses felt good—Sakura had had a few, behind the school. Once, twice, three times with a boy that wasn’t as cute as Sasuke. But it had never gone further, and she hadn’t wanted it to.
Everyone else had started to care about sex, but she didn’t. She cared about making the blood stop. But still, she found herself reading those pages—the bookmarked ones—in her orange book at night, after everyone else in the house had gone to sleep. She stuck it beneath her mattress during the days, so nobody else would find it.
And maybe she snuck the sequel out of the bookstore a few days after she'd snuck the first. Maybe she bookmarked pages in that one too. And maybe once, a few weeks after that, she’d gotten…curious in the shower.
It did feel good. It wasn’t sex because she was alone, and the only hands touching her were her own, but it did feel good. She could see why the Hound read these books, if they made him feel…curious, too. Once (or, maybe twice), Sakura wondered if he did what she did. Did he do… that in the showers too, like she did? Or maybe he did it before bed? Did—did he get aroused —
No, it didn’t matter. Sakura didn’t think about him. She wasn’t interested. She wanted to know how to make the blood stop.
But she did see him sometimes, guarding the shadows. He was tall, and he had horrible posture. He had silver hair, and one of his eyes was always, always closed. The tattoo on his shoulder sometimes made her stomach feel funny, a little tingly.
Once (only once), she wondered if he’d ever done any of the things in that book. Had he ever pressed a girl against a wall and kissed her? Had he ever kissed a girl in a hot spring? Had he ever pulled off a girl’s clothes? Had he ever done that one thing on page 197 that Haru did to Junko? Where he’d—where he’d used his mouth —?
That, Sakura thought, had to be an exaggeration. Surely something just for stories, and not something that happened in real life. Surely people didn’t use their mouths —
No. She wasn’t interested. Or curious. She was learning, she was apprenticing, she was working. But, still—she did read the books at night. And sometimes, just as she’d done as a child, she wondered what the Hound looked like beneath all his masks.
***
Two years later, on a rainy night in the middle of a long shift, she very nearly got her answer. ANBU agents were brought into the hospital en masse after a mission had gone wrong, and Sakura had been assigned three of them to heal. Two of them had died. A seal mask, and a fox mask. But then there was the third, whose mask had fallen right off his face. It didn’t matter much though, because he wore another mask beneath.
A dark mask, black cotton. Silver hair, and one eye firmly closed.
“Pink hair,” he murmured, looking up at her with a curious, foggy grey eye. It flashed with sudden awareness—and then panic as he glanced around, and tried to sit up. Sakura pushed him back down with a firm hand, but he grasped her wrist and yanked it away. “No, no —”
Sakura remembered it suddenly, that thing he’d told her almost a decade ago when she’d bandaged his arm. He didn’t like hospitals. She’d be willing to bet that he hated them.
Weird. Didn’t he know that this was where they made the blood stop?
“Lie down,” Sakura told him, and pressed her hand to his chest again. He gripped her wrist harder; exerting the strength must’ve been taxing to him, because his face paled. He was bleeding from his abdomen, a deep gash low in his belly.
“No,” Hound said. His voice sounded vicious.
“Yes,” Sakura said. She gathered chakra into her hand, and pressed more firmly against his chest to keep him down.
His skin was warm. She remembered that. She could feel the heat of it even through the layers of the uniform he wore.
Hound opened his other eye. His scarred one, the one she’d only ever seen closed.
“No,” he said, vicious still.
Sakura flinched backwards, mouth dropping open—because it wasn’t a grey eye that glared back at her. It was red like blood, full of spinning tomoe, deeply angry.
Sharingan.
Quicker than a flash, quicker than she could think, he vanished, shunshining away.
“Shit,” she hissed.
Hound, he’d said they called him. He hadn’t told her of his other nickname, the scary one, the one everyone across villages knew. Copy-nin. Just the Copy-nin, and no other, human name. Maybe it had been forgotten. Maybe he’d never been given one.
Shit. He was bleeding. He was bleeding, and she had to make it stop.
Sakura grabbed a bag, and started shoving bandages into it. She ignored the supervisor that called after her as she strode out of the hospital, bag slung over her shoulder.
She knew where he’d be. Somewhere in the shadows, because he always guarded the shadows. But she felt a little nervous, because what if he wasn’t there? What if he’d gone somewhere else? What if he was bleeding and bleeding and bleeding and she didn’t find him in time to make it stop?
She ran. All over the village, searching every shadow, not panicking because she had trained and trained and trained to be able to keep her cool in a situation like this—until finally, finally, after over an hour had passed and the rain had slowed to a drizzle, she found him. He was lying back against the trunk of a tree, near the outskirts of the village.
Iwa-nin had invaded here, once. Enemy shinobi, crossing over into the borders of Konoha. Sakura didn’t think about it, because she didn’t like to think of that day. And because he was bleeding, and she needed to make it stop.
“Don’t move,” she told him, as she knelt onto the damp ground beside him. Her knees squelched in the mud.
Hound—the Copy-nin —turned his head to look at her. His eyes flashed, one grey and one blood red.
“Sakura,” he said. His voice was rough, hoarse. His skin was pale. His abdomen was still bleeding profusely.
“Yes,” she said back, because she liked absolutes. She was Sakura.
He looked away from her. “Go away. I’m fine.”
Sakura frowned. Cautiously, she reached forward—he flinched when her fingertips brushed his abdomen, but he didn’t shunshin away.
“Don’t move,” she murmured. He’d said that to her before, years ago.
He was bleeding. She’d make it stop. She pushed his shirt up to his chest and let the chakra flood her fingertips, and slowly—mercifully, she felt his skin begin to knit back together beneath her hands.
“Tell me…about your books,” she said, latching onto the first thing she could think of, half-afraid he’d disappear again.
His eyes snapped back over to her. They were wide, surprised—and then immediately crinkled in amusement. “You've read Icha-Icha?”
Sakura blanched. “No,” she lied vehemently. (There were four books now hidden beneath her bed. Four.) “No, I haven’t.”
“Maa, you’re a bad liar.”
“I don’t read them,” Sakura lied again. “Just…tell me about them.”
His eyes closed. He sat rather stiffly, tense beneath her hands. But he spoke, and told her about the plot of the books she’d read in secret for years. From the first book to the last, every detail perfectly correct, all the way up until—
“And then he kissed her under the waterfall, and then he—”
“He didn’t kiss her under the waterfall,” Sakura cut in, “he kissed her in the hot spring, the waterfall was when they—”
She realized her mistake when his eyes cracked open again, bright with triumph. “Now how would you know that, Sakura-chan, if you haven’t read them?”
The chakra flowing through her fingers stopped dead. Heat flooded her face, flushing her cheeks. “I’ve—I’ve heard rumors—”
Hound raised a silver eyebrow. His eyes were crinkled again, as if he were smiling beneath the dark black mask that covered his mouth. “You really are a bad liar.”
Sakura sniffed at him. She let the chakra rise to her hands again, and stared determinedly at the wound on his abdomen. For some reason, her heart was racing.
“They’re gross.”
He laughed. “They’re interesting.”
“They’re—they’re full of—” she couldn’t say it. Not in front of him. “They’re perverted!”
“Maa, they’re dramatic,” he argued. “There’s intrigue, and adventure, and—”
“And sex,” Sakura said, scandalized. She glared at him, bright red because she’d said it.
He blinked at her, and then tilted his head, appraising. “Aren’t you a little young for that?”
“I’m seventeen,” she said testily. “And a medic-nin. I know about—I'm old enough.”
It was quiet for a moment, because he shrugged, and stopped arguing with her. Sakura kept working on him, and breathed a little easier because the blood had stopped entirely now. She needed to clean whatever was left of the wound, and maybe use a bandage to keep everything secure, but—
“Why don’t you like hospitals?” Sakura blurted the question, and immediately regretted it when he stiffened beneath her fingers. She grabbed a handful of his shirt, to keep him right where he was.
He looked at her dolefully for a moment, and then closed his eyes again. “Because that’s where—“ he paused, and cleared his throat. “People die there.”
Sakura hummed. He was right, she supposed. People did die in hospitals.
“Not always,” she said softly. “My parents didn’t.”
One of his eyes—the grey one—opened slowly. “No,” he murmured. “They didn’t.”
Time passed like that, for a little while. Sakura remained kneeling on the muddy, wet ground, and her hands stayed on his abdomen gripping his shirt until her fingers went numb. He had a few scratches on his arms and she idly wondered if he’d let her fix them too, but probably not. Maybe she should bandage them, just to keep them clean.
He was…warm. So warm. And—well-muscled. She couldn’t stop thinking about the books he liked to read, and wondered for the umpteeth time if he’d done any of the things in those stories.
He had to have, Sakura realized. He was older than her, maybe by a lot. At least a decade, if he’d been old enough to protect her years ago, on the day everything had changed. Her heart, still racing, began to beat a little faster and she wasn’t sure why.
“What do they call you?” she asked quietly. Hound, Copy-nin. Dangerous. He did have a given name, didn't he? He had to be someone, underneath the masks.
His other eye opened to join the first. He fixed her with it, studying her with a blood-red gaze and spinning tomoe. “They call me Hound,” he said softly.
And then he vanished with a faint pop , lost to the shadows.
***
The art that inspired this. Be back soon with chapter two!! <3